The Undergraduate and Postgraduate Conference 2024: On Language, Linguistics and Literature was held on 27 May 2024.
Reading and communication, Virginia Woolf notes in The Common Reader, is less about knowledge acquisition than the delights and intimacy one finds in “extend[ing] our intercourse beyond our own time and province”. Our first UG-PG conference on Literature and Language accomplished this goal by gathering undergraduates and postgraduates with diverse education and cultural backgrounds, who communicated their unique perspectives on research areas that matter personally to them. This year, we are also honoured to have two keynote speakers from HKU and HKBU to share their recent research with us.
Professor David Carless (HKU) began our morning session with an interactive and exciting keynote speech on the design of academic assessment under the advent of AI. This is followed by five undergraduate presentations, in which students showed a broad range of interests from T.S. Eliot’s and D.H. Lawrence’s modernism, Henry Melville’s anti-modern aesthetics, African women literature, to meme studies. In our parallel postgraduate sessions, our students from the GELCS programme shared their work on Jane Austen’s ecofeminism, the symbolic meaning of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the challenge of mental health treatment and patient’s autonomy, as well as a creative project on ecology issues in documentary photography. Concurrently, three of our students from the ELTA programme made an impression on the audience with their work on a psycholinguistic study of food-related vocabulary, music comprehension in relation to gender and capacities, and research on IELTS writing using J.R. Martin’s genre-based approach. We concluded our conference with Dr. Winnie Chor’s (HKBU) fascinating keynote speech on the mismatches between social and discourse-pragmatic purposes in English and Cantonese linguistics.
It is our hope that the UG-PG conference will become a place where our students and other researchers can meet annually to share the developments of their work in a friendly and professional environment. Huge congratulations to the presenters who have successfully made their debut as an HSU scholar!
